Why I'm a hypocrite
This 2025 paper convinced me to turn on paid subscriptions on Substack.
Hi folks,
Welcome to 2026! It’s so good to see you here. I hope you had a good time over the festive season, and feel refreshed and ready to kick ass, and take names.
You may have noticed I turned on paid subscriptions in December, reversing the decision I made in early 2025 and described in a previous post.
So what happened? Am I a sellout? Am I a hypocrite? Sure. The unfortunate answer is that I live in a rapacious capitalist culture, and need to pay the bills in order to have time and space to make art.
But, that doesn’t mean I’m paywalling all my posts. Every post will remain free to read for an entire year, but if you choose to subscribe to the Green Room, you’ll get extra value as a premium member with additional information, resources, access to my comics, books, and more.
I don’t have much experience with paid subscriptions.
Like many of you, I have a semi-abandoned Patreon account that I have been unsuccessfully trying to build for some time.
But I do have experience with crowdfunding, specifically reward-based crowdfunding, having run several successful campaigns on Kickstarter and Crowdfundr. I believe crowdfunding is an important tool for indie creators, and has been a viable mechanism to engage an audience around your work.
Now, I had assumed there were four basic types of crowdfunding: reward-based, donation-based, equity-based, and lending-based, but then I came across this 2025 paper1 which made me head spin. The authors proposed that platforms such as Patreon were actually subscription-based crowdfunding platforms. Such models are characterized by a funding model that offers continuous payments from supporters to creators.
Now, this work was likely done prior to Substack becoming… Substack, which is why it was missing from their analysis, but as soon as I read this, it made intuitive sense. I had spent all this time thinking about these platforms the wrong way, when I should’ve understood them as an extension of the crowdfunding model.
But, just as there are differences between All-or-Nothing platforms like Kickstarter, and Keep-it-All platforms like Crowdfundr, I suspected there would be differences between reward-based and subscription-based models. Indeed, the title of the paper hints at such a difference: One size fits all? - Examining differences between motivations for supporting creators on subscription-based crowdfunding platforms.
Since I’ve spent a lot of time digging into the evidence base for reward-based crowdfunding, it seemed only logical to do the same for subscription-based crowdfunding.
The paper was interested in understanding the difference between backer motivations in these two models. They begin by introducing the two main types of motivation: extrinsic and intrinsic, but note that since subscription-based crowdfunding is relational, they wanted to focus on those intrinsic motivations that thrive on connection and feedback, namely altruistic, image, social comparison, and recognition motivation; these four motives have previously been used to explore backer support in reward-based crowdfunding. These four motivations in the crowdfunding context refer to:
Altruistic
Altruism is described as interpersonal helping at the expense of personal costs for the person offering help.
Image
Individuals want to be perceived as competent by other individuals. In the online environment, people convey information about themselves via signals towards other individuals, and this can influence other users behaviours. In this way, image motivation captures the desire to build an online reputation
Social Comparison
Individuals are motivated to compare their ability or performance to others, this is referred to as social comparison.
Recognition
Recognition describes the acknowledgement of one’s achievements, and recognition motivation captures a backers’ desire for acknowledgement. Specifically, in the crowdfunding context, backers want to be acknowledged for their contribution to a campaign.
Based on this mental model, the paper sought to test four hypotheses about subscription-based backers, namely that they have higher altruistic motivation, higher image motivation, higher social comparison motivation, and higher recognition motivation compared to backers of reward-based campaigns.
The authors recruited 343 participants through an online platform to participate in surveys, adapting various motivational screening tools. After screening, they were able to divide n=336 participants into two cohorts: those who had backed reward-based crowdfunding campaigns (n=205) e.g., Kickstarter, and those who had backed subscription-based campaigns (n=131) e.g., Patreon. They then used propensity matching to ensure cohorts were the same size (n=131). Analysis showed there was no statistically significant difference between groups in terms of demographic information such as gender, age, education etc.
To compare motivations between groups, the authors used a Mann-Whitney U-test, which found the following motivation scores:
Altruistic: mean of 4.49 for subscription-based backers, compared to mean of 3.90 for reward-based backers (p<.001).
Image: mean of 3.11 for subscription-based backers, compared to mean of 2.52 for reward-based backers (p<.005).
Social comparison: mean of 3.09 for subscription-based backers, compared to mean of 2.56 for reward-based backers (p<.001).
Recognition: mean of 3.19 for subscription-based backers, compared to mean of 2.44 for reward-based backers (p<.005).
Which provides statistically significant evidence to support all four hypotheses listed above.
What does this mean for creators?
The evidence in this paper shows that these four motivations are more important for subscription-backed crowdfunding than for reward-based crowdfunding, and creators need to tailor their campaigns to enable these motivations.
For altruistic motivation, creators should form strong connections with backers, showcasing their personality, and speaking to the philanthropic nature of their work. For image motivation, platforms themselves should add features to stimulate this motivation amongst potential backers, e.g., social media feeds, online personas. For social comparison, platforms should consider offering comparative tools such as public leaderboards, whilst creators should pay attention to publicly acknowledging supporters. Finally, for recognition, creators should outline their gratefulness to their supporters
As you read the above, you probably had the same reaction as me: these enablers are exactly the functionalities that Substack has created, specifically the charts function which enables social comparison, and the notes function, which enables image motivation. The other two motivations are driven by creator interactions, but it’s quite incredible to note that Substack has exactly these features. Indeed, Patreon has recently added a new social media feed feature, “Quips,” to its platform as a discovery mechanism, but which has the added bonus of enabling image motivation amongst backers.
This suggests that building a subscription-based crowdfunding campaign on Substack means you are already targeting 50% of the important motivations for backers. Of course, the remaining 50% requires creators to do the work and provide value to subscribers.
Even so, this finding was the thing that prompted me to re-think my opposition to paid subscription on Substack.
But just because you turn on paid subscriptions, it doesn’t mean you will get any. Creators need to develop plans for stimulating the altruistic and recognition motivations amongst potential backers. This is markedly different from stimulating extrinsic motivation in reward-based crowdfunding, where the promise, and/or variety, of potential products, is a key part of the appeal to backers.
I have a long way to go to build a community of subscribers around my work on Substack, but this paper outlines some ways to approach that challenge.
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What do you think? Have you run both types of campaigns? Do you agree with the findings here? Let me know in the comments.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10257-025-00711-8
Yes, this is why I train them together, and say you should have 4 PBS style pledge drive events a year, for all the reasons you mentioned. Great article.